Packet-based networks such as the internet tend to employ best-effort forwarding strategies whereby packets travel through the network with no particular guarantees regarding travel time or jitter. In certain instances, however, network services require or would benefit from certain guarantees or preferential treatment and systems have been developed to provide higher priority for certain packets and to guarantee certain Quality of Service (QoS) standards for these packets. Providing improved quality of service for certain packets adds burden on network resources such that it is not usually possible to maintain the highest levels of QoS for every packet travelling through a network section. In this context it is necessary to limit the assignment of high-priority to only packets associated with critical services or services that require high QoS. Typically, high QoS services require special packet handling at the various network devices (e.g. routers) that packets travel through in the network. Most solutions for providing improved QoS for certain packets prescribe that the packets carry a priority level indicator to be used by the network devices to identify the priority level of the packet. Unfortunately, most sources of data packets (e.g. at the customer premise) cannot be trusted to assign their own priority level to packets, as it is in the best interest of each to declare a high priority. This makes it difficult for carriers to discriminate between those packets that should truly be entitled to improved QoS and those that should not.
In the context of the above, it can be appreciated that there is a need in the industry for an improved scheme for managing priority level assignment at the customer premise.